FAMILY TIES

DANCE

20 Mar

Recently landed: Family Ties

Gracia’s written response to The Australian Ballet’s Anna Karenina by Yuri Possokhov, especially for Fjord Review.

At a train station of the St Petersburg Railway, I arrive. A prologue, in Moscow. In the State Theatre, first viewing. Live streaming on Ballet TV, the second. As the engine smoke clears, I get my bearings. Taking my seat on the platform, in both audiences, I am rendered diminutive. The station is a vast cavern, looming overhead. It is a projection, but it is so cinematically real in its rendering. I might be experiencing the Australian Ballet’s new co-production with the Joffrey Ballet of Yuri Possokhov’s Anna Karenina, but I am also visiting a friend: Tolstoy’s timeless literary work. And not unlike Anna herself feeling that “everything was beginning to go double in her soul,” I am in 2022 and I am in the Industrial age Tolstoy so opposed.

I take my guidance from the familiar lines of the novel on which this ballet is based, “all happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.”[i] As Tolstoy later wrote in a letter to his wife, Sonya, in 1877: “In order for a book to be good, one has to love its basic, fundamental idea. Thus, in Anna Karenina, I loved the idea of the family.”[ii] Family is the nutshell which encases both the novel and this sumptuous retelling on the stage. Family obligation and restriction, and its support. Family ties, many and varied. Through Anna, naturally, married to Alexei Karenin, and the “bewitching tension” between her and Alexei Vronsky which reaches “such a pitch that she was afraid every minute that something within her would snap under the intolerable strain.” And Konstantin Levin, who “Whenever he arrived in Moscow, .… was always agitated, frantic, slightly awkward, and annoyed by this awkwardness and, more often than not, came with some completely new and unexpected way of looking at things.”

From a vantage similar to the book, I am placed in the swirling, shifting middle of things. This journey is one of an infinitude of human emotions, not dissimilar to when Vronsky first encounters Anna: “it was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will.” Both casts whole-heartedly embody this sense of things overflowing the confines of the body, and the changing patterns of the dancers, and the rolling sets by Tom Pye, convey the many swift changes of mood. This ballet demands, through enticement and flashes of jewel-coloured underskirts, that you keep up, lest you be made a fool of in the company of Countess Nordston[iii], played with relish and vim by Jill Ogai (upon first dip) and Nicola Curry (live stream, beamed). The lighting design by David Finn, and projection design by Finn Ross enhance Tolstoy’s words: “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”

[i] All quotations from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are from the translation first published in Penguin Classics 1954 by Rosemary Edmonds.

[ii] Judith Armstrong, ‘Guide to the Classics: Anna Karenina’, citing Sonya’s diary entry, dated 3rd March, 1877, from The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy translated by Cathy Porter, with an introduction by Doris Lessing, in The Conversation, 19th January, 2018, https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-anna-karenina-86475, accessed 2nd March, 2022.

[iii] Jill Ogai and Nicola Curry, in keeping with the changeable nature of all things, where a snow storm can suddenly appear “more beautiful than ever,” later play Princess Betsy Tverskaya.